In last night’s Democratic debate in Austin, Barack Obama was responding to a question about his readiness to be commander in chief. After explaining a bit about his approach to military issues, Obama spoke about conditions in Afghanistan for U.S. troops after resources were diverted for combat in Iraq.
“I heard from an Army captain, who was the head of a rifle platoon, supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24, because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition; they didn’t have enough humvees.
‘They were actually capturing Taliban weapons because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief. Now that’s a consequence of bad judgment, and you know, the question is on the critical issues that we face right now who’s going to show the judgment to lead. And I think that on every critical issue that we’ve seen in foreign policy over the last several years — going into Iraq originally, I didn’t just oppose it for the sake of opposing it. I said this is going to distract us from Afghanistan; this is going to fan the flames of anti- American sentiment; this is going to cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives and overstretch our military, and I was right.”
Today, the right side of the blogosphere is all worked up about Obama’s anecdote, which they insist is impossible, making Obama a liar. (Of all the various right-wing responses, my personal favorite was this one, which repeatedly calls the senator an “Obidiot” — far-right humor is just so droll — before concluding, “Thank you lord for making liberals such simpletons.”)
So, who’s right? As a rule, the phrase “the right side of the blogosphere is all worked up…” should be a dead giveaway.
ABC News’ Jake Tapper did a little legwork and checked Obama’s story out. The campaign put Tapper in touch with the Army captain directly and, not surprisingly, he backed up Obama’s story.
The Army captain, a West Point graduate, did a tour in a hot area of eastern Afghanistan from the Summer of 2003 through Spring 2004.
Prior to deployment the Captain — then a Lieutenant — took command of a rifle platoon at Fort Drum. When he took command, the platoon had 39 members, but — in ones and twos — 15 members of the platoon were re-assigned to other units. He knows of 10 of those 15 for sure who went to Iraq, and he suspects the other five did as well.
The platoon was sent to Afghanistan with 24 men.”We should have deployed with 39,” he told me, “we should have gotten replacements. But we didn’t. And that was pretty consistent across the battalion.”
He adds that maybe a half-dozen of the 15 were replaced by the Fall of 2003, months after they arrived in Afghanistan, but never all 15.
As for the weapons and humvees, there are two distinct periods in this, as he explains — before deployment, and afterwards.
At Fort Drum, in training, “we didn’t have access to heavy weapons or the ammunition for the weapons, or humvees to train before we deployed.” … “We weren’t able to train in the way we needed to train,” he says. When the platoon got to Afghanistan they had three days to learn.
They also didn’t have the humvees they were supposed to have both before deployment and once they were in Afghanistan, the Captain says. “We should have had 4 up-armored humvees,” he said. “We were supposed to. But at most we had three operable humvees, and it was usually just two.”
So what did they do? “To get the rest of the platoon to the fight,” he says, “we would use Toyota Hilux pickup trucks or unarmored flatbed humvees.” Sometimes with sandbags, sometimes without.
Also in Afghanistan they had issues getting parts for their MK-19s and their 50-cals. Getting parts or ammunition for their standard rifles was not a problem.
“It was very difficult to get any parts in theater,” he says, “because parts are prioritized to the theater where they were needed most — so they were going to Iraq not Afghanistan.”
“The purpose of going after the Taliban was not to get their weapons,” he said, but on occasion they used Taliban weapons. Sometimes AK-47s, and they also mounted a Soviet-model DShK (or “Dishka”) on one of their humvees instead of their 50 cal.
Maybe I’m just a simpleton, but it sounds to me like Obama’s anecdote checked out.